Explore Quotes by Bertrand Russell

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.

It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.